Throw away that RX 350 F Sport dash, Lexus

DanNeil

Dan Neil/The Wall Street Journal

The 2013 Lexus RF 350 Sport.

We begin with what Lexus calls the Remote Touch controller. I call it Satan.

It’s a sort of square, upholstered computer mouse, a gimbal controller about the size of a motel soap. In the car’s center console, the controller is situated ahead of a narrow padded hump that provides an ergonomically correct wrist rest. The cursor (either an arrow or a highlighting box) ricochets around the 8-inch LCD display, which in the RX 350 F Sport is positioned way up in the dashboard, near Canada.

As the cursor lands here and there on the screen, the controller subtly pulses and tugs at itself with what’s called haptic feedback, which helps operators by providing an affirmative, snap-to-grid feel.

Well, I have a hardware issue with this system. I would like to take an ax to it, but an ax is too big, really, to swing comfortably inside a car. I’m considering a hatchet. And yet, an ax would be so nice.

The dashboard controls of the Lexus RF 350 Sport.

Great Odin’s Raven. This thing. In the interests of simplifying the man-machine interface, the Lexus unit combines four buttons, one rocker switch and one compass controller, which is as delicate as a Norden bomb sight. Some of the simplest functions require a sequence of menu drill-downs. The graphical Back button moves around from one display screen to another. There’s no hard button for Back, only Menu. And everything, as I said, is in thrall to the delicate, wilding cursor controller, which in a moving automobile is about as accurate as whizzing out a third-story window.

To be clear, I don’t like it.

Now, here’s the interesting part: The Remote Touch controller has been in Lexus
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vehicles for several years now, and I’ve probably driven a half-dozen cars so equipped (including the RX crossovers and the CT 200h). When it was introduced, it was widely praised; Popular Mechanics gave it a Technology Innovation award. Previously, the Remote Touch struck me as reasonably functional interface and, covered in taut glove leather, handsome. I’m left wondering why I have turned against it in the new RX 350 F Sport.

Two theories of Remote Touch relativity

I have a couple of theories: The first, strangely enough, has to do with suspension, wheels and tires. The RX 350 F Sport is a slightly breathed-upon, up-optioned version of Lexus’s suburban fembot, including a stiffer suspension and bigger, racier wheels and tires (19-inch alloy wheels wrapped in pretty aggressive Dunlop all-season tires). Thus set up, the RX F Sport has a relatively zingy and concussive ride, just enough to upset one’s aim with the Remote Touch controller. I wonder if the engineers can recalibrate the system’s sensitivity, to give the cursor a little more stabilizing inertia as speed and suspension movement increases?

My second theory has to do with our experience of obsolescence. Have you ever gone back to using your old smartphone? It’s like one of those painful last stands in romances, the goodbye lunch, when everybody knows, you’ve moved on. Siri, can you read me that text? Oh, that’s right, you’re not Siri. I forgot. Awkward.

But what constitutes obsolescence? It’s not simply that the older device lacks the services of the newer. It’s ease of use, facility, the intuitiveness of the operating system. That’s what makes it hard to go back to lesser systems. And of all the sciences brought to bear in modern automobiles, human-factors engineering seems to be evolving fastest.

Which brings me around again to the Lexus system, which just four years ago seemed quite clever and now seems clumsy and naive, compared with the recent crop of systems with capacitive (touch-sensitive, iPhone-style) touch screens.

Also, the Lexus’s aural icon is a none-too-classy “da-donk” sound. Great, a $50,000 car that sounds like Whac-a-Mole.

The 2013 Lexus RX350 F Sport

As someone who cycles through new cars on a weekly basis, I can tell you the space in the dashboard between the front occupants, the center stack of displays and switches, is the most hotly contested square foot in the car business. And for good reason: Most cars of similar size, configuration and price perform pretty much the same. A vehicle’s man-machine interface, the MMI, is a place where car designers can do some open-field running.

Or stumbling. Cadillac’s new MMI, called CUE (Cadillac User Experience), uses an elegant, gloss-black waterfall panel with capacitive switches for volume, HVAC and seat temperature. There is also an 8-inch capacitive touch screen mid-dash, displaying an iPhone-like terrain of icons, apps, and assorted mobile JavaScript for navigation, phone, audio and vehicle settings. The CUE system, deep with features and surprisingly intuitive, with fun features such as natural-voice recognition, allows connected drivers to transition from their smartphones without missing a beat.

And the CUE system is lovely. Supplanting a dash array of complicated (and expensive, and difficult to update) switches, the CUE offers a glossy, aviation-style flush panel that, like the Lexus controller, provides haptic feedback.

As I observed in my review of the Cadillac XTS, GM’s luxury brand got out over its skis a bit with the CUE system. The first generation of the capacitive panels has proved to be a little balky, responding a few milliseconds slower than iPhone natives are used to. But the design is sound.

Based on my experience with the RX 350 F Sport, I declare the rotary controller obsolete. Capacitive switchgear will kill the dial controller, probably within one product generation or two.

And now, just a few months after the CUE system made its debut, we have two high-volume cars from Ford
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—the Fusion and the Lincoln MKZ—with consolidated touch-screen/capacitive switch panels. The MKZ panel, in particular, recommends itself as a sweeping banked console that flows between the front seats. The gear selector comprises a vertical row of P-R-N-D-S touch-screen buttons on the left of the central LCD touch screen (shades of the ‘64 Plymouth Valiant). The sliders for cabin temperature and audio volume are also capacitive and are landmarked with bright alloy bevels, which make them easier to find and use than the controls in the Cadillac
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panel.

The effect of all these panels is to contemporize the cockpit layout in a way that adds a lot more function while subtracting many more switches and buttons. Given these systems’ clarity, functionality and modernity—the way the human interface crosses over from other digital devices—I think it will be hard to go back.

So there it is. Based on my experience with the RX 350 F Sport, I declare the rotary controller obsolete. Capacitive switchgear will kill the dial controller, probably within one product generation or two.

And yet, the handwriting is on the wall for capacitive switchgear, too. Soon gesture-recognition systems, which will read the occupants’ hand gestures in the empty air, will supersede touch screens and capacitive switches, avoiding, among other things, greasy fingerprints on the controls. The geography of fixed switches will disappear altogether.

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